School reading ‘neglected’

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33513, 19 April 1974, Page 3

School reading ‘neglected’

The Department of Education was failing in its struggle towards literacy in New Zealand schools, the immediate past-president of the Booksellers’ Association (Mr G. \V. Tait) said in Auckland yesterday.

Speaking to an in-service training course organised by the Auckland Headmasters’ Association, Mr Tait said that oral communication was now receiving all the emphasis in schools. “The goal of literacy has been replaced by ‘oracy.’ If you want to know what that neologism means you will have to ask the faceless but powerful men who devise our educational curriculum. “It is a question that they should certainly be asked, and in public, because, in my reading of it in publications of the Educational Development Unit, it is nothing but arrant nonsense.” Mr Tait said that all teaching was finally a matter of teaching reading. More than 80 per cent of New Zealand school teachers were incapable and incompetent in the teaching of reading. “In our teachers’ colleges student teachers are taught how to teach art. history, geography, social studies, mathematics and all manner of things except the most important of all when you consider that practically everv lesson is, in effect, a lesson tn reading.”

in all educational circles only lip service was being paid to the importance of reading and now, after nearly 100 years of compulsory education in this country, many schools had no books, not one had enough books, and most teachers did not know how to teach reading.

Xot having the materials with which to handle reading problems and not know-

ing how to handle them, the schools had abandoned the subject. “In secondary schools, at least, the struggle towards literacy is being discarded.

"Already the violent and undeveloped behaviour of illiterates from our schools is alarming the public in general and the police in par- ' ticular. It is my opinion that ' as long as the Education De- * partment persists in this new fashion (of ‘oracy’) and refuses to face up to the problem it has avoided for 100 years, then violence against person and property will increase, communication in trade and industry will become more chaotic, and we will have to double the number of our mental hospitals to 'house those whom we fail to i bring to maturity,” Mr Tait I said.